The union says it was trying to protect the integrity of a contract signed with the city just this year.

Why would the city sign off on a contract full of stuff the Booker administration now says the cops are selfish to keep? Why a contract that took the cap off medical payments, even as the mayor complains that the city health insurance bill is part of the fiscal problem? Why did the mayor single out the NPD as the only one with employees who have not had to take furloughs, when he signed the contract that says there will be no furloughs for cops? Why hire a bunch of new cops in the face of a financial crisis that turned them into sacrificial layoff lambs?

The city blew this. Even so, the union should have allowed the vote, whatever the outcome. On Tuesday at City Hall, I found a line of citizens waiting to pay water bills and tax bills at the finance office. The vote they cared about was the one in May, which elected a city government that had just handed up more taxes and fewer cops. No one I talked to was buying what Booker and Police Director Garry McCarthy told the press earlier that morning: that the NPD had reorganized to put even more officers on the street and continue police operations without a hiccup.

"This new structure is going to work better for us," McCarthy said. "I’m taking my most senior commanders and putting them where the rubber meets the road." Deputy chiefs will replace captains as precinct heads. The deputies used to be in charge of gang, narcotics and other citywide units, the very operations the city had been citing as reasons for an overall drop in crime. Now the administration says that collapsing the citywide units for precinct-level operations will not affect one darn thing.

At one point, McCarthy said the new structure is so good, he wished he had thought of it before. If so, perhaps he should be thanking the FOP, instead of disparaging it. I’m not saying Newark is now completely vulnerable to the gangs and the crooks. But to say the crime fighting won’t suffer is as hard to believe as the contention that the police contract and late police hiring happened because Newark got hit with a financial crisis it didn’t see coming.

Yes, all communities are looking at layoffs and cuts. Newark, however, has known for years that even if the overall economy was good, the city would have a financial problem right about now when a series of land lease payments from the Port Authority came to an end.

Yes, the city has hired a few $100,000-a-year executives, and there were a couple of multimillion-dollar contracts for things like public relations and websites that didn’t quite work. But the Booker administration says it has been trying to cut and conserve since 2006.

It was also clear, or should have been, that any additional financial pressure on the city budget would require immediate attention.

Last year, as Newark was negotiating its police contract, the national economy was already heaving. Locally, foreclosures, tax appeals and tax defaults were taking a toll on revenue. As soon as he was elected, Chris Christie declared that municipal aid cuts were coming and cities could not look to the state for bailouts. Did they think he was fooling? The time to ask the union for givebacks was at the negotiating table, not after Newark signed the contract and certified it had money to pay for it.

Last year, the mayor and council made a political decision to postpone, until after the May election, a vote on an unpopular plan to borrow against future water revenues. The water plan was defeated, there was a frantic search for alternatives. The police rejected the city’s demand for givebacks. The city rejected the union’s alternative offer.

Time ran out on the kind of compromise and negotiation that might have prevented layoffs.